The strange case of the Yeti finger is one of the most intriguing tales in the cryptozoo world.  Part Indiana Jones movie plot, part cryptozoology, the mystery started in the 1950s and has only now been resolved.

The Yeti finger is part of the so-called “Pangboche Yeti remains.”  The remains consist of a partial skull and a mummified hand alleged to have come from a Yeti (a.k.a. Abominable Snowman), the legendary creature said to roam the Himalaya Mountains.

The relics first came to the attention of westerners in 1958, when a team of explorers – including famed cryptozoologist, Peter Byrne – discovered them in the Pangboche monastery in Nepal.  The lamas considered the remains to be sacred and had been using them as part of their religious ceremonies for many years.  In an interview with London’s BBC, Byrne described the mummified hand:

“It looked like a large human hand. It was covered with crusted black, broken skin.  It was very oily from the candles and the oil lamps in the temple. The fingers were hooked and curled.”

The lamas allowed the explorers to view the Yeti remains, but denied their requests to cart them off for further scientific study.  But that didn’t stop Byrne and his backers, one of which was millionaire monster hunter Tom Slick from Texas.  They simply hatched a plan wherein they would swap one of the crusty Yeti fingers with that of a similarly mummified human finger. After Byrne received the human finger substitute from Slick – he dared not ask where it came from! – he returned to the monastery in Nepal and asked if he could examine the relic again.  When the monks weren’t looking, he performed a little sleight-of-hand, so to speak, by breaking off the Yeti finger and wiring the human one in its place.  He slipped the specimen into his jacket and promptly made his exit.

The stolen Yeti finger was eventually smuggled to the U.K. with a little help from the famous actor, Jimmy Stewart (Rear Window, It’s a Wonderful Life), and his wife Gloria, who happened to be in India at the time.  According to Byrne:

“Tom Slick helped ensure the finger would reach London safely with the help of his friend, the Hollywood actor James Stewart. They were a little bit worried about customs, so Gloria hid it in her lingerie case and they got out of India no trouble.

“They arrived at Heathrow [airport], but the lingerie case was missing.”  A few days later, a customs official returned the case to the Hollywood couple, reassuring Gloria that a British customs officer would “never open a lady’s lingerie case.”

The finger was given to London University primatologist William Osman-Hill, who conducted a physical examination. He initially announced that the bones were of human origin, but then changed his mind, saying that he believed they might belong to some unknown primate.  Later, in 1960, he decided that the specimen must have belonged to a Neanderthal.

After so much finger pointing, the matter was eventually forgotten and Hill’s specimen was lost.

The mystery of the Yeti finger may have ended there, if not for the tenacious work of renown cryptozoologist Loren Coleman.  In 1991, while researching material for a book about the life of Tom Slick, Coleman tracked down an American anthropologist by the name of George Agogino.  Agogino, who was one of Slick’s expedition consultants, had retained samples of the alleged Yeti finger! The television show Unsolved Mysteries promptly obtained the samples and concluded that they were “similar to human tissue, but were not human.” A short time later, the original hand (the one with the swapped human finger) was stolen from the Pangboche monastery, and reportedly disappeared into a private collection via the underground antiquities market.

In 2010, WETA Workshop – the award-winning FX and creature designers of King Kong, Lord of the Rings, etc. – announced plans to create replicas of the remains for the Pangboche monastery, who had been greatly affected by the loss.  (See my previous post about this.)  Their efforts, however, may be affected by new information that came to light on December 27, 2011.

According to a newly published BBC article, the Royal College of Surgeons was granted a request for a DNA test to be carried out on a tiny sliver of the finger.  Using modern DNA sequencing, they concluded that: “The finger is of human origin.”  According to Dr. Rob Jones, senior scientist at the Zoological Society of Scotland:

“We have got a very, very strong match to a number of existing reference sequences on human DNA databases.  It’s very similar to existing human sequences from China and that region of Asia, but we don’t have enough resolution to be confident of a racial identification.”

So as it stands, the famous specimen doesn’t appear to be from an undocumented primate.  However, the story itself is still fascinating.  And one still has to wonder where the human hand and skull cap came from in the first place?  Those monks obviously have a bit of explaining to do!

For more about this, I recommend reading Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology by Loren Coleman.  Tom Slick was a real life monster hunter with an amazing life story.

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